It’s Woodside’s world — we’re just renting it from them while they boil it.
Woodside has its own media organs — not merely the world’s most powerful media company, News Corp, but high-volume right-wing plagiarism site the Daily Mail and Kerry Stokes’ Seven (which, unlike News Corp and the Daily Mail, at least isn’t a foreign-owned troll farm interfering in Australian politics). It has its own federal and state politicians on both sides as its policymaking arm. As we know, it has its own intelligence agency in ASIS. It has the WA police force as its private militia. It has all the apparatus of an autocratic state except the military parades.
Woodside’s propaganda arms are continuing their war against independent media and objective coverage of Woodside: in a story that the term “beat-up” is far too generous for, Stokes’ West Australian reported that Four Corners will be broadcasting “controversial” footage of a protest outside the home of Woodside CEO Meg O’Neill, “despite intense backlash and an internal review revealing the public broadcaster lied”. Not to be outdone, The Australian hastily cobbled together some confected outrage this morning.
This is pure circularity: the “intense backlash” was manufactured by Woodside’s political and media allies themselves.
Meanwhile, Woodside’s security militia, the WA police, demanded the ABC hand over all footage related to climate protests, leading to concerns the footage might reveal the identities of ABC sources.
There’s a reason why there’s a new round of frothing by Woodside’s police and media minions: Four Corners is examining one of the key weapons increasingly being used by the fossil fuel-political-police-media alliance — the application of severe penalties to climate protesters and police harassment of them. The phenomenon is by no means confined to the Woodside state. The mere idea of a media outlet uncovering the process of applying massive state force against protesters, those trying to halt activity that is inflicting colossal damage on the planet, alarms the fossil fuel alliance.
This abuse of state power is an inevitable outcome of the process by which fossil fuel companies have captured the state and the media in Australia. Fossil fuel companies effectively control both sides of politics, at least to the extent that Labor will continue to allow the proliferation of fossil fuel projects and minimal taxation of the profits from them, via political donations, offers of post-political jobs, threats of heavily funded media campaigns and, in Labor’s case, the co-option of relevant unions to apply internal pressure within Labor to support fossil fuels. At the state level, this means effective control of both the policymaking process and the criminal justice apparatus, including the police.
This effectively closes off the political system as an avenue of climate action, even as the planet grows hotter at a seemingly ever-quicker pace and extreme weather becomes the norm. Those who recognise the need for far more urgent action to halt the rise in CO2 emissions are blocked from achieving anything through Parliament, while the terms of public debate are framed by large media companies: climate protesters are “extremists”, fossil fuel CEOs innocuous business figures generating billions in exports and thousands of jobs while having their privacy and families threatened by radicals.
Denied the possibility of a political solution, advocates of more urgent action naturally turn to protest and direct action, only for that avenue to be demonised by media companies and targeted by fossil fuel-controlled governments.
But using the state’s monopoly on violence to deter this choice won’t wish away its causes. Woodside and its political agents can’t ban the laws of physics. As the planet gets hotter and more lives and livelihoods are destroyed and disrupted, and the political system remains blocked to genuine action, the urge for protest and direct action will only increase, no matter what the penalties — especially for younger Australians, who stand to suffer far more from our obsession with fossil fuels than the middle-aged people who dominate the media and parliament.
Real journalists want to report on, and analyse, this literally disastrous misapplication of power in the interests of fossil fuel companies. The rest may as well be on Woodside’s payroll.
Ah, for the sixties and protest singers like Dylan! The evil ones can’t ban music, and they can’t stop people singing. It worked back then – it just might work again.
“Now gather round people, wherever you roam,
And admit that the fuelists are burning our home,
And accept it that soon you’ll be charred to the bone,
Till our land is not worth the saving …”
De dumm da de dummm dummm …
Ok. I admit it, I’m not Dylan. 🙁
If we didn’t have protest the Franklin River would have been dammed, the Rocks would be tall skyscrapers and conscription would have ruined more of our young people’s lives, women would not be able to vote etc etc. protests are an integral part of a democratic society seeking the best for our future, our environment and our people. It is a disgrace that every effort is made by governments to ensure that our planet continues to burn and our environment destroyed.
Ah, but protests are so… inconvenient…
Lock’em up and throw away the key, cries the democracy and free speech loving mob.
It wasn’t protests that saved the Rocks. It was Green Bans led by the communist Jack Mundy and the Builders labourers Federation, (BLF). Well done comrades.
Whereas key unions are now key elements of the push to continue extracting FF’s and cut down forests.
I have to question if the CEO is up to the task if she struggles to handle criticism. You want to head up a fossil fuel company in the 21st century, knowing that carbon emissions are driving climate change? Expect some flak and stop being a big baby. CEOs earn big bucks for a reason.
Don’t worry WC. She’s no baby. She just knows how to work the media.
You are probably right. Anybody who runs a fossil fuel company knowing what we know about climate change must be pretty evil. They would sell their children to keep their bonuses and shareholders happy.
Yes, she’s either an evil political operative feigning fear or she’s a precious petal. A lowly bus driver on $30 an hour casual rate goes to work each day facing the threat of verbal and physical abuse at close range. The woman gets millions each year and finds it so frightening to have demonstrators on the footpath outside her multi-million dollar beach-side mansion.
The price of democracy?
You know you’ve got an uphill battle when a government jumps in to devote tax-payer funded resources to do a spot of buggery of a foreign government’s delegation, involved in talks to develop the ’emerging’ nation’s resources – to benefit a company donating to the bugging government.
I hope Woodside kept the receipt when they bought this job lot….
People in WA conducting non-violent protests face prison sentences equivalent to those for murder. This indicates the degree of terror their protests stimulate among the rich old people for whom money today is worth more than a liveable planet tomorrow. When all the non-violent opposition are serving long sentences in a WA gulag, we might then see a new generation of opposition arise, who might be more inclined to direct action, as it were.
may as well be hanged for cow as a hen